Cruel Gun Story

CRUEL GUN STORY is very reminiscent of Kubrick's THE KILLING: a group of motley criminals plan to rob a horse race track (or in this case, a truck transporting money from one). They believe this will be an easy pay day, the perfect crime. Unfortunately, human folly and bad luck get in the way.

While this idea has been done before, CRUEL GUN STORY is a great take on the classic tropes with its very human characters and chilly style. The action scenes are thrilling and the undercurrent of weary humanity puts this among the best of late-stage classic noir.

Fairly mundane set up, criminal looking to do one last job, with fairly typical characters, but well done and with a Japanese outlook and form. Bleak and dark with some nice action and final act. Worth seeing for old Chipmunk Shishido who plays it cool as usual.

This is the first Takumi Furukawa movie i've watched. Recently, i watched another movie with the same leading actor (BRANDED TO KILL, Jo Shishido) and i thought this was going to be something like BTK. I was wrong. CGS started like a dark comedy/comedy- crime movie but as it progressed, it became a typical crime drama movie. It was good, i liked it a lot. Fast-paced, ahead of its time, this reminded me of some 90's-early 00's movies, in which a criminal is gathering a gang in order to perform a crime, most of them are unlikeable characters and they already think how to betray each other. In that respect, CGS looks timeless and innovative. Characters are unlikeable but interesting too, i had a lot of fun watching all of them making their plans and scemes. No second wasted, action scenes are intense, and Shisido is great in his role, progressively becoming more likeable making the viewers sort of empathizing with him, even though his crimes are Unredeemable.

I can't rate it higher, i expected something more imaginative and weird like BRANDED TO KILL, etc. But still, this is a good crime drama for the fans of this genre. And the ending was great.

This wonderful box-set from Radiance, World Noir Vol.2 with the German, Black Gravel (1961) and the French, Symphony for a Massacre (1963) were fine but this third one from Japan was not as good. Of course, Joe Shishido is great and all the actors fine but the story is just too simple and predictable. There is a lot of shouting and hitting each other for little reason and much double cross although there are some decent shoot-outs. Shishido was starring the same year with Youth of a Beast (1963) and later with Branded to Kill (1967) both fantastic and it is just a shame that this one just not good enough.

Film 4/5 in the Nikkatsu Noir series, and like Take Aim at the Police Van before it, Cruel Gun Story has a great title.

This one is less noir-ish and more of a straightforward heist film than any of the films in this boxset that came before, and I was perfectly okay with that. Heist movies are always satisfying when they get the basic components right, and all the stages are executed fairly well here- the planning, the heist itself, and then the inevitable fallout and consequences.

There's some good shootouts, and Jo Shishido makes for a good lead, as he always seems to do. I wish the aftermath of the heist had been a little more engaging, or at least on par with the first two chunks of the film, but it still had a decent conclusion overall.

Easy to recommend if you want something like Stanley Kubrick's The Killing, which is another tight and satisfying black & white heist movie that I should maybe revisit some day.